Large Hadron Collider: Looking for the “God Particle” and Beyond

“We are absolutely and totally confident that the LHC machine
is perfectly safe, just as we were last year. And I'm not at all worried
about it being destroyed by its own future!”

- Lyndon Evans, Ph.D., Physicist and Manager, LHC Construction

“We’re really confident with the LHC that we’re going to find
the Higgs boson or something similar, which will help to explain what’s
going on in the universe.”

- Steven Goldfarb, Ph.D., LHC Muon Spectrometer, ATLAS Experiment

Looking straight down a segment of the 17-mile-long circular Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator. Image courtesy CERN LHC.In some theories, microscopic black holes may be produced in particle collisions that occur when very-high-energy cosmic rays hit particles in our atmosphere. These microscopic-black-holes would decay into ordinary particles in a tiny fraction of a second and would be very difficult to observe in our atmosphere. The ATLAS Experiment offers the exciting possibility to study them in the lab (if they exist). The simulated collision event shown is viewed along the beampipe. The event is one in which a microscopic-black-hole was produced in the collision of two protons (not shown). The microscopic-black-hole decayed immediately into many particles. The colors of the tracks show different types of particles emerging from the collision (at the center). Computer graphic and actual Large Hadron Collider image below courtesy CERN LHC.This computer-generated image shows the location of the 17-mile-long (27 km) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel (in blue) about 300 feet down on the Swiss-French border. The four main experiments (ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb) are located in underground caverns connected to the surface by 50 meter to 150 meter pits. Part of the pre-acceleration chain is shown in gray. Illustration courtesy CERN LHC.

November 19, 2009 CERN Geneva, Switzerland - Beginning Friday night, November 20, 2009, on the border between Switzerland and France, not far from Geneva, and three hundred feet underground, humans will try again to start producing subatomic energies close to those in the Big Bang. By early Saturday morning, the first beam of particles should be circulating one way around the LHC’s 17-mile-long underground ring. Then a second beam traveling in the opposite direction should start soon after. But the first low-energy collisions won't happen until about a week later.

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